Mavericks: Use Maps to See Traffic and Alerts

With OS X 10.9 Mavericks, we can use the fancy new Maps program to plan our routes around construction slowdowns, accidents, and all sorts of other traffic problems. To see how this works, open Maps, and first, you’ll make sure that “Show Traffic” is on by clicking the button with the little cars on the toolbar.

Then you’ll be able to see four types of alerts, and you can click on any one to view its details. Road closures are red prohibitory circles:

General alerts are yellow triangles with exclamation points:

Construction notices look like this:

And accidents look like the car’s butt is yelling or something:

You can also see how traffic is flowing in an area. Orange dots indicate that it’s moving slowly; red dots indicate that it’s stop and go.

So as you can imagine, these indicators are pretty darned useful if you’re traveling somewhere and want to confirm that an accident isn’t slowing things down or what have you. However, it’s always a good idea to verify that any information is correct with your state’s Department of Transportation if it’s critical to your travel plans. Don’t be like me and drive three hours only to find that the road you meant to travel is closed for the season.

Yes, that really happened, and I had to drive three hours back, too. I'm ashamed.

This is truly slick! I haven’t been using Maps in OS X very much, other than when it is invoked by another app, but had not noticed this feature.

Now I can look prescient, omniscient even, the next time my wife asks me to look someplace before we even get to our car (our car is equipped with adaptive SatNav, so is constantly redirecting us around snags in real time).